Task is out of Season. There is
delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of
Olney--glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam.
Cowper paints trees--Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous
lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter--Cowper,
in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or
awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to
antithesis--a deceptive style of criticism--and see how Thomson sings
of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in
his Soliloquy on the Seasons--

"The cherish'd fields
Put on their winter-robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet
"brown," where all that is motionless is white--

"The foodless wilds
Pour forth their _brown_ inhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by
memory--a critic you may always trust to--is admirable; except in one or
two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic,
and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased
to be perfectly natural. Thus--

"Drooping, the ox
Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint
him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of
all his toils"--to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was
well entitled--sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call
it doubtful--for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment.
Again--

"The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
_With looks of dumb despair._"

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us--one
night at Ambrose's--that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed
with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any
circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own
feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow
their instincts. Thomson redeems himse